No more familiar Colorado Department of Transportation plows rolling down the Denver-Boulder Turnpike pushing snow to the sides of the highway. No more CDOT crews patching potholes or sealing cracks on the busy road, either.

Starting later this year and lasting until 2063, U.S. 36 between Denver and Boulder will be maintained and operated by a private consortium known as Plenary Roads Denver. The consortium -- made up of six companies with expertise ranging from finance to construction to road design -- was chosen last week by CDOT to complete the second phase of the U.S. 36 Managed Lanes project and then maintain the entire corridor for the next 50 years.

The contract also gives Plenary Roads maintenance responsibilities along Interstate 25, from U.S. 36 to downtown Denver. The consortium will not only take care of the highways' surface conditions, but will collect tolls in the managed lanes.

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CDOT says the public-private partnership is the agency's first and is made necessary by a 30 percent decline in CDOT's budget over the last five years.

Nicholas Farber, an enterprise specialist with the High Performance Transportation Enterprise division of CDOT, said without being able to tap into the private sector's capital reserves and share the risks of taking on the multimillion-dollar project, improvements to U.S. 36 between Louisville and Boulder couldn't be made for another 20 years.

CDOT is in the midst of a 3 1/2-year effort to reconstruct and widen 17 miles of U.S. 36, which was built in 1952, while adding an express/toll lane in each direction that will also serve half a dozen bus rapid transit stations in the corridor. The managed lane will be open to high-occupancy vehicles and buses while solo drivers will have to pay a toll to ride it.

The first phase of the project, from Federal Boulevard to 88th Street in Louisville, broke ground last summer. The second phase, which would cover the distance from 88th Street to the Table Mesa Park-n-Ride, is expected to begin in the fall.

"This is a way for CDOT to complete a needed project in a fiscally constrained environment," Farber said. "To help the public go to their jobs, their schools and their recreational activities in a timely manner."

According to the U.S. 36 Final Environmental Impact Statement, employment in the corridor is predicted to grow by 53 percent and the population by 28 percent by the year 2035. About 90,000 to 100,000 commuters now travel the corridor each day.

'Threats to public interest'

But public-private partnerships, or P3s, do not sit comfortably with everyone.

The U.S. Public Interest Research Group issued a report in 2009 entitled "Private Roads, Public Costs," which warned that while privatization deals appear to offer public officials a "quick fix" in a time of budgetary belt-tightening, "They often pose long-term threats to public interest."

The report claimed that P3s can result in governments handing over significant control over regional transportation policy to companies that are accountable to their shareholders, and not to the public. And it said the economics of P3s -- where revenues are typically generated from decades of toll collections -- often favor the private company operating the highway.

Phineas Baxandall, a senior analyst for tax and budget policy with PIRG and author of "Private Roads, Public Costs," said his analysis of P3 road projects in Indiana and Chicago found that private investors would recoup their investments in less than 20 years even though the P3 deals had terms of 75 and 99 years, respectively.

"The state of Colorado might think it's wiser than the Wall Street financiers on this, but it's the Wall Street financiers' job not to lose on these kinds of bets," Baxandall said. "It's very hard to know what the traffic patterns will be in the future. CDOT should make sure that any contract it signs should give it leverage to adjust the terms according to changing circumstances."

That might mean specifying in contracts that the private operator must stay abreast of and incorporate the latest changes in transportation technology into the highway, whether that's a new surface material or a series of roadway sensors.

"The contract should give the state the ability to tell the company to catch up to the latest roadway standards," Baxandall said.

According to a 2011 report from the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, 24 states have used a P3 process to help finance and build nearly 100 transportation projects worth $54 billion. Colorado is one of the more prominent states in the category, with the report citing the 46-mile E-470 Tollway, which broke ground in 1989, as the first example of a major P3 transportation project in the country.

Marc Lemon, senior counsel with McKenna, Long & Aldridge in Washington, D.C., and former chief counsel to the Federal Highway Administration under President George W. Bush, said P3s are being seen as increasingly necessary in an era when government entities "are either maxed out or they don't have the ratings" to issue bonds.

He also said the popularity of hybrid vehicles and other fuel-efficient models has put a dent in the pot of money -- gasoline taxes -- states depend on to pay for road construction and maintenance.

"The primary benefit of public-private partnerships is that you can get access to tremendous amounts of private capital that is interested in being invested in this kind of infrastructure," Lemon said. "You're going to get a very important infrastructure improvement very quickly that you wouldn't have gotten without it."

And, Lemon said, P3s don't transfer ownership of a road to a private entity but rather offer operational efficiencies that are not always easy to extract from a government bureaucracy.

"It's not like we're selling off an asset to a foreign investor and we're never going to get our highway back," he said.

'Still our road'

The Denver-Boulder Turnpike is scheduled to be returned to CDOT in 2063, when the agreement ends. In the interim, the highway doesn't become a Plenary Roads-branded thoroughfare devoid of state oversight, Farber said.

"It's still our road," he said. "We are giving them the right to collect tolls on it. But it's still going to look like a Colorado road."

And he said his group was careful not to give anything away in the arrangement it arrived at with Plenary Roads Denver, which is comprised of The Plenary Group, Ames Construction, Granite Construction, engineering design firm HDR, maintenance provider Transfield Services and financial adviser Goldman Sachs.

Farber wasn't able to disclose details of the deal because there are still elements of it that are yet to be finalized, but he said it would involve CDOT making a "small" upfront payment to Plenary Roads to construct Phase II of the U.S. 36 Managed Lanes project. Maintenance costs going forward would be covered by the tolls Plenary Roads collects in the corridor, with everything beyond a "guaranteed rate of return" for the company going back to CDOT, Farber said.

"We definitely made sure that we kept the public interest in mind as we negotiated this contract," he said.

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